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Today, my friend (yes, Renee, we’re still friends) blogged about NaNoWriMo and whether it was a good thing or bad thing. Rather than repeating what she said, go read her post.

*hums jeopardy theme while clicking through pictures of Katherine Monneig*

Oh, haha, welcome back. Her? That’s Shane. You know, from L Word?

*crickets*

Fuck it.

I’ve never participated in NaNoWriMo. Never had a desire to for a few reasons:

1) It’s annoying as hell to type NaNoWriMo with all those alternating capital and lower case letter. My pinky gets cramped every time.

2) Word counts mean nothing to me. I can spend all night writing an 800 word flash fiction piece and be just as happy as those clowns who brag on twitter that they wrote 3k words in 45 minutes. Good for them. It’s shit. Trust me. The first draft of anything is putrid.

3) And here I’m going to reiterate something Renee said only to drive the point home – NaNo indirectly encourages people who have no calling to be a writer to write 50k words of shit, then haul ass over to Lulu or Createspace or whatever and publish that piece of garbage because they want to be the next E.L. James.

But that doesn’t mean I think I CAN’T put out 50k words of hell knows what in a month. I’ve done it before. In fact, the two books I’ve written (both still in draft one form because HOLY GOD are they shit) were on paper in less than a month each. But I did that almost 4 years ago back when OFW was a group on Goodreads. I’d just penned the first one that I titled Sacrifical Lamb Cake and loved the process of it so much, I decided to learn more.

That’s when writing became difficult and the focus to just sit down and write fizzled.

Learning about the craft of writing is important for anyone wishing to make writing a career, but it also fuels that internal editor that whispers doubt and endless revision in your ear.

NaNoWriMo, for me, will be about seeing if I can put a tight little noose around said editor’s neck for 30 days and bang out something worth editing, revising, and maybe, one day, publishing.

OR – it’ll be the end of all things and I’ll snap, go on a seven state killing spree, and later the police will find me naked and bloodied in an alley, rocking back and forth, still trying to finish my outline on a brick wall using the blood of my victims as ink.